Firefox Going the Big and Bloated IE Way? 653
abhinav_pc writes "Wired is carrying an article pondering whether Firefox has become big and bloated, much like IE. As the browser's popularity has risen, the interest in cramming more features into the product has as well. Slowdowns and feature creep have some users asking for a return to the days of the 'slim and sexy' Firefox. 'Firefox's page-cache mechanism, for example, introduced in version 1.5, stores the last eight visited pages in the computer's memory. Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use. Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer. Firefox addresses this issue somewhat, setting the default cache lower on computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM. Though the jury is still out on where the perfect balance between too many and too few features lies, one truth is apparent: The new web is pushing our browsers to the limit.'"
is it time (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:is it time (Score:5, Insightful)
The majority of websites could do with a simple and less cluttered layout like google's website for instance. Compare it to yahoo and you'll see that yahoo has a bunch of "advanced features" like inpage tabs and whatnot. Lots of this extra junk you'll find around the web is javascript that chooses CSS based on browser and that displays advertisements. Lots of it is just poor use of HTML often from WYSISYG programs. More features in language means more junk on website. More junk on website means more junk in browser.
The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the problem is the foolish complexity of it. Their whole XPCOM idea sounds nice in theory. But then you actually go to implement it in C++, and it becomes a pile of crap. Soon enough, difficult tasks start to become hard, the damn near impossible tasks can't be done, and nobody really has a good idea of what large portions of the codebase actually does. That's not the way to create an efficient rendering engine. You'll end up with memory leaks galore, and excessive CPU consumption, just as we've witnessed with Firefox.
Although it's unlikely to happen now, the best thing for them to have done would have been to throw out most of the code released by Netscape, rather than rewriting a lot of it (at the same low-quality level) in the following years. Then they could have re-implemented it using a natively-compiled implementation of Standard ML. One benefit of this would have been an elimination of the memory leaks that we hear to much about today, due to the garbage collection of SML. Additionally, functional languages are well-suited to parsing (ie. of HTML, XHTML, etc.) and language implementation (ie. JavaScript), more so than C++.
Re:The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:5, Insightful)
I once attempted to create a page-rendering engine, starting with XHTML. Eventually, I got a decent-working rendering engine. Unfortunately, anytime there was an error (even a minuscule one), my engine would completely fail. I can't even being to imagine the hell Gecko goes through to render a site like MySpace [w3.org]. I've often thought about a better way to implement a rendering engine, but most involve fixing the web developer's crappy code before attempting to render it, which is not possible in most cases. In C++, you can't compile with an error. Perhaps development software that isn't notepad (my software of choice) should add in validation service in the same way Visual Studio 2005 does.
The internet: We have the tools to rebuild it, but we don't want to spend a lot of money.
Re:The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:4, Insightful)
The flip site of strict error handling (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, the fact that those early versions of Mosaic, Netscape, IE, etc. would do something with broken code instead of refusing to display it meant that the barriers to entry were a lot lower. It vastly increased the pool of people who could create web pages, and the talent pool. Sure, some people have both artistic talent and programming ability, or have the resources to team up. But can you imagine a web built solely by programmers?
Eventually the authoring tools would have caught up. But I have to wonder if the web would be as big and diverse as it is now if it hadn't been able to pull in the casual author back in 1995.
Yes, we have crappily-coded sites like MySpace. On the other hand, 10 years ago the idea of visiting a website was inordinately dorky, and being online meant you were a social outcast. Now, it seems like being offline is considered freakish.
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But can you imagine a web built solely by programmers? [...] I have to wonder if the web would be as big and diverse as it is now if it hadn't been able to pull in the casual author back in 1995. [...] 10 years ago the idea of visiting a website was inordinately dorky, and being online meant you were a social outcast.
But what is wrong with that? Yes, I know... Amazon and Ebay and such depend on the casual surfer, but would it really be so bad if the internet comprised primarily academics and programmers and serious hobbyists instead of primarily preteens (and older folks with the maturity of preteens) with too much time on their hands? Call me an elitist, but I don't feel like it would be much of a loss.
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Right. Well put.
Re:The flip site of strict error handling (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, it probably would have consisted entirely of porn.
Re:The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:4, Informative)
For example, it fails to recognize the head tag here:
<!-- *** VERSION 2.0 CSS *** -->
<!-- *** ELS2MWEBNET0756 *** -->
<html>
<head>
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Re:The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:4, Informative)
Also see this kuro5hin story [kuro5hin.org].
Re:The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than that there really isn't anyone to take their place. Oon windows I highly doubt that you'll see many converts going back to IE, even if microsoft somehow makes it stop sucking with IE8, which I guarantee won't happen anyway.
Thoughts on rebuilding codebases (Score:4, Insightful)
In a moment I'll talk about my views on rewriting large code bases, but first I'll say that I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was with the GP poster up until the SML advocacy, and then disagreed. Even given the neat way that functional languages tend to model parsing problems, web browsers do a lot more than parse HTML and CSS files. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this is the easiest problem they solve. Systematically resolving the layout rules in arbitrarily complex cases is a somewhat difficult problem, given the way those rules are expressed in CSS. And of course, web pages are no longer the static things they used to be: today's browsers need to cope with scripts moving the goalposts arbitrarily, maintaining the integrity of the display as much as possible during lengthy downloads of large pages or after AJAXified updates, etc. etc. It's far from clear that a language like SML offers better support for these naturally concurrent operations than the many alternatives.
I do disagree with the parent post on one fundamental point, though:
I'll see your reuse dogma, and raise you my "plan to throw one away" dogma. :-)
Actually, I don't cite this as some sort of dogmatic adherence to ConceptsTryingToSoundMoreCleverThanTheyAre at all. Rather, I happen to agree with the principle based on practical experience. In general, software design is difficult, and few people are good at it. Even those who are rarely have the good fortune to know exactly what their design will be called upon to do a few years later, and will inevitably allow more flexibility (and commensurate overhead) in some places than is really needed, while making some things unnecessarily strict and thus making later changes more difficult than they might have been.
It's been my experience that in long-term projects, far too many managers aren't willing to throw out a whole module, subsystem, or even product, because of popular wisdom that anything they replace it with will just have bugs of its own. I believe this is a mistake because, again speaking only from my own experience, a high proportion of bugs originate in special or boundary cases. According to my reasoning above, a new project built from scratch with no prior experience will rarely get an overall design that automatically avoids these completely. Discipline is rarely good enough on software projects to allow for this and ensure that new requirements are integrated into a clean overall design rather than bolted on; indeed, in a commercial environment, this may not be realistic given short term deadlines and the typical management and marketing pressures. However, over time, such bolted-on special cases will tend to build up. They start to interact, they don't always get properly documented, and new people on the project team either don't know about them or at best don't know all the original reasoning behind them, making safe maintenance difficult.
Sometimes, this problem is manageable, particularly if your project leadership consistently take a long-term view and give maintenance and testing the priority they deserve. But usually, IME, the problem reaches a certain critical mass where the costs of ongoing development of a code base full of dubiously documented special cases outweigh the costs of stopping to clean things up.
As an additional, very practical concern, tools and programming techniques are always developing. Over the sort of timescales we're talking about here, it's entirely possible that more effective tools will have been created, or more effective techniques discovered, that could solve the underlying problem much more effectively in a different way.
Thus, s
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Sera
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Sera
Re:is it time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:is it time (Score:5, Insightful)
There's still a lot of people out there who are limited to dialup, satellite, or some other jerry-rigged internet connection.
rethink the OS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:rethink the OS (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:is it time (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not really Firefox's fault. Eight Web pages worth of cache is nothing... when you're not visiting a site that has 6 CSS stylesheets, 8 JavaScript sources and 20 images eight pages is a breeze. But visit most Web sites today, and you'll find that that's a dying dream.
Fortunately, well-designed Web sites can take advantage of this. For example, MediaWiki has tons of CSS and JavaScript associated with each page, but it's shared in common across almost all of those pages, so keeping 8 pages in cache isn't all that much more expensive than keeping one.
Re:is it time (Score:4, Informative)
Very nice FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Disingenuous FUD aside, I can't for the life of me imagine how IE could be "bloated". It never had much functionality to begin with.
Kudos to Bashdot. Even the current Digg submission [digg.com] doesn't mention IE at all.
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, talk about bloat!
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Seriously. I use FF because it has a lot of handy plugins, which could be counted as a healthy form of bloat, not because it is faster or smaller than IE. I have been doing some heavy DOM scripting lately (using Javascript to procedurally generate and update web pages) and FF is actually a little slower than IE when it comes to the things that are typically expensive.
If you look at the code (painful) or read the Mozilla road map for FF, it becomes clear the current code base is a tangled mess of legacy
Re:Very nice FUD (you too) (Score:5, Informative)
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Windows 2000, Gran Paradiso 3.0 latest alpha, default theme, only extension installed is Flashblock, and the memory size of firefox.exe temporarily grows by 200 MB when printing even the simplest page. (Bug 379844)
Re:Very nice FUD (Score:5, Interesting)
The instance I'm typing this into (2.0.x) has been up for about three days. I have no idea how many tabs I've opened and pages loaded, but the task manager shows ~300MB mem and ~120MB VM usage. Keep in mind right now I only have two tabs open.
I suppose one could say the solution to the problem is restarting Firefox at least once a day... except that restarting a web browser seems about the stupidest thing ever.
Still, I put up with it because it's far better than IE6. I don't like Opera, so I don't have a lot of choice.
FF memory leak (Score:4, Interesting)
The crux of the problem is that the bug affects only win32. So the developers, one and all, refuse(d) to treat it as a codebase problem because it has to be a windows problem.
"slow" in this instance means over 1 minute and easily 2-3 minutes. I even demonstrated at the time that it's not paging issue as such as mozilla/FF sits doing absolutely nothing (from perfmon monitor tool) for long period and when it finally starts swapping pages in it happens pretty quickly (5-10sec)
It was subsequently "fixed" by making FF etc hold on to the memory they've reserved instead of releasing it back to the OS. Hence you get ridiculous 300MB memory footprint that shrinks to 50MB after restarting FF even with the same pages open. Same goes for TB and all the other apps I'm sure.
So if you've got any kind of memory leak, mozilla apps want to keep it all in ram.
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I have 10 tabs open, and Firefox 2.0.0.3 on XP Pro SP2 is eating 150 MB of RAM and running painfully slow at the very moment, especially when I try to do "File Menu > Save As" on a page, then the entire browser freezes for almost 90 seconds after I click the save button, even if it's just a text page -- I haven't browsed to any graphic intensive pages, just a lot of pages.
In the recent past, i've had 300MB memory usage on just 3 tabs. I wasn't surfing to pages that contained heavy graphics, java,
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I'm surprised that no one has called me on my claim yet, but here's a sample demonstration anyway. Open the following the links in your favorite browser, in the order listed, keeping the IDG site at the top after you're done:
Shockwave site [zeronews-fr.com]
Java site [time.gov]
Flash site [www.idg.se]
When I do that, VM Size goes over 150 MB and CPU usage goes over 20% in Firefox, IE, and Opera. It's not up to 250 MB and 50%, but you get the idea with just three tabs and a minute of browser usage. Just add a few more resource-heavy sites, and
well no wonder (Score:5, Funny)
well (Score:3, Insightful)
The amount of RAM used for caching pages could be set by the user in the options. I think most Firefox users could handle that.
To turn off the cache (Score:5, Informative)
browse to about:config
search for the browser.cache.memory.enable setting
set it to false
restart the browser
On my machine, that lowers the memory footprint from 125MB to just under 50MB.
Alpha Bravo... (Score:3, Funny)
GRANDMA, LISTEN ITS ABOUT:CONFIG
ABOUT WHO NOW?
CONFIG!!!
KENNY FIG???
Re:well (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, for geeks. But if we want people to stop using IE we must provide a credible alternative.
There should definitely be an option to tell Firefox to use less than n megabytes of memory, and let firefox figure it out, instead of setting the memory limit through the number of undo levels per tab.
Re:well (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Speak for yourself, dude....
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox=Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Firefox=Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, there's Opera (Score:5, Interesting)
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The end result of it is that you have a browser that looks 'relatively natural' on a wide variety of platforms and can be easily extended and themed
But not only does Opera run on more platforms than Firefox does, but it's also just as themable [opera.com] as Firefox is (not to mention considerably more customizable out of the box without having to mess about editing css files by hand). Your argument doesn't really hold up.
Firefox also has better support of a number of standards (MathML, SVG, Javascript 1.7) that Opera has little/no support for (they support SVG tiny, but that doesn't seem to do too much).
If you're trying to argue that Opera has worse support than Firefox than standards, I don't think you're going to succeed. The only major omission is MathML. You have SVG in your list, but in my experience, Opera has considerably better supp
Re:And yet, few use Opera (Score:4, Interesting)
To put this into perspective, I haven't had a security problem on a windows box in over four years. All you need is to follow some good practices and you're perfectly safe. Vista with its limited user powers should help a lot in reducing the effort involved in those "good practices".
I love my Mac, but WTF do I have to reboot after updates?
Because the kernel has been updated. After you update itunes a reboot is not needed.
Is it horrible that an OS designed in the late 1960s, when the industry was still so young and inexperienced with security, is better-designed than NT and its descendants, which were designed twenty years later?
If you're referring to multics, no commercial operating systems have caught up to that yet. If you're referring to unix I have to disappoint you, unix was not designed to be inherently secure. On early versions there were many security issues, because the concept of limited user powers took a while to gain a foothold, and even when they did the system's design was still full of security holes. The first internet worm (the morris worm) specifically targeted unix systems, in case you've forgotten. Just look at the security track record of commercial unices. It's pretty poor.
Linux is not inherently more secure than other commonly available operating systems, it's just too much of a moving target because there is no binary stability, so a worm can't target large swaths of systems at the same time. That binary instability is a strength, but it's also the reason why there are so few binary drivers and commercial applications on linux.
Opera! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Opera! (Score:5, Insightful)
And I think it should. Guess that's why different things matter to different people.
Re:Opera! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes the best tool for the job depends on how far into the future you are looking. Free Software advocates are more pragmatic than you think. You just need to stop thinking about what works today and start wondering about what will work tomorrow. Mark Pilgrim wrote a couple [diveintomark.org] of decent articles [diveintomark.org] about the kinds of problems proprietary software can cause.
Now I don't use Opera for anything other than testing, so I don't know what kinds of risks that particular software exposes you to. What I do know
Re:Opera! (Score:5, Informative)
That's got to be the dumbest argument I've heard in favor of Free/Open Source Software in a long time. Look at IBM's mainframes. I don't think you could get more closed or proprietary. Yet, many businesses have stuck by them due to the fact that backwards compatibility is never broken on those machines. Heck, you could run OS360 packages from the 70's on the modern zOS machines without a problem.
I think its just a bit extreme to say that no proprietary solution is practical in the long term. It depends on the application, the stability of the provider, and the relationship that you have with the provider. These three criteria apply whether the provider is the open-source community or a private company.
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I just had the freakiest experience with Opera, and I wonder if anyone here can explain: As some of you may know, in addition to regular back and forward buttons, opera also has a "go where I want" button. I had suspected that it worked by simply finding the end digit in the URL and adding one, ie if you're viewing 42.jpg and hit "go where I want" you go to 43.jpg. But I've just had it figure out that the image after "07.jpg" is "chapter2-01.jpg".
HOW DOES IT KNOW?!
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all in all i love it as a primary browser, sometimes i encounter an incompatible site, and then i switch to IE because i know it's a site i can thrust, and otherwise i work with opera, knowing that so few people us
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I call bullsh1t on this. You've reviewed all the source of all the pgms you use? Stop this argument, please, it's not a real reason to choose one over the other unless you're actually willing to go through the source of every one of them, and I doubt you have the time, and if you do - you should do something better with it
Re:Opera! (Score:5, Interesting)
You can save your specious arguments for an audience that will buy them. We don't have to review the source of all the programs we use to gain the "transparency" benefit of Open Source or Free Software. The idea is "many eyes", not "my eyes".
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The issue you have is that you don't trust the set of eyes, but the process is fundamentally the same if you do not review the source code yourself. You are trusting someone else to assure you nothing is wrong, and confusing motive with action.
The people who try and claim that FOSS is better than closed
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Seeing as most people who look at firefox's source code go blind soon after, I'm not buying this.
Yes, hundreds of thousands of people can in theory look at the source; but then all of them think that someone else will do it, and nobody actually *does*. (Not counting
The issue is conflict of interest (Score:3, Informative)
Oh so Open Source is all about relying on someone else to review the code for you? Please tell me how this is different from a software house paying QA guys to do it
You make the same argument as JordanL did [slashdot.org]. The answer [slashdot.org] is the same: we need many eyes reviewing in the interest of the public, not many eyes reviewing in the sole interest of the company.
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Right. The same "someone", usually. And a "someone" whose interests are not those of users.
This is the same reason we usually trust a result published in a peer-reviewed journal more than one reported by a corporation with only internal peer review, even when the resources available for the internal peer review may be excellent.
It's the difference between "here's our results, here's how we
Re:Opera! (Score:5, Funny)
That's possibly the most insane statement I've ever read by someone who claims to be savvy enough to fork a development project on his own. If you really think it's possible for an OS to pass information over a network in such a manner as to make it undetectable, then I have a very special invisible firewall to sell you. Don't worry, it's open source.. I only charge for the distribution costs.
All software... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Less available RAM" (Score:3, Informative)
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But seriously man, I am yet to see firefox go above 120MB, I've seen some trolls saying it can get to 500MB! And who cares if you are not able to play those FULL SCREEN games and have your browser open at the same time? And is it so difficult to got to options\Advanced\Set cache size to 0, there should you go if you got infinite bandwidth and a tendency to open a lot of other applications while browsing?
Oh my god, I just hate how frequent this flamebait is, people won't switch to opera, seriously get over
Streamlined Version (Score:5, Insightful)
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At least some of the complaints I've heard about "firefox bloat" have turned out, on closer examination, to be due to memory leaks in the Flash plugin.
And that's a disadvantage of plugins: they're complex bits of code that run in the same memory space as firefox and have the ability to screw it up arbitrarily badly, but that aren't part of the main code base, so aren't u
Besides the cache (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Besides the cache (Score:4, Funny)
A quick glance at the Firefox features page lists these things, which as far as I'm concerned are bloat as they are not fundamental to a web browser:
I don't see any reason why all of those things are integrated and not seperate addons. And that list gets bigger with each new version.
And then you're nothing but IE... (Score:4, Insightful)
As to the parent post, let's see now:
RSS Support:
I could easily see removing RSS support. Firefox's implementation is nothing an extension couldn't do, and do much better. It's a joke for handling more than a handful of feeds, and stifles development of third-party extensions. Gee, and we used to complain about competing against built-in programs...
Security:
Can you honestly say a browser should be shipped without these, or even an option to not install them? Especially for the popup blocker - are you insane, or have you simply forgotten what the popup-infested web was like? Phishing protection is unobtrusive and useful, as is auto-update.
Miscellaneous:
Integrated search was one of the highlights of Mozilla ages ago, and is now a standard feature in every single browser. Firefox/Mozilla did a particularly good job by adopting an existing open format (from Apple's Sherlock) rather than reinventing the wheel. Search suggestions are the latest evolution of that (primarily thanks to Google Suggestions, if I'm not mistaken). Spell check is marginal - many operating systems offer their own - but I don't see how a third-party extension could improve upon it. Accessibility is just critical for those who need it. Session Restore I'm torn on, as many extensions handled it, but not necessarily well. I see that as the Firefox team deciding to take all of the lessons learned from the third parties, and do it right (much like Apple did with iTunes 1.0).
Bloat is only a problem if it hinders program development, maintenance, execution, or usability. The examples given here don't generally meet those criteria. Most of the features here are simple, self-contained, unobtrusive, and likely have low code and memory footprints.
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For a seminal work that explains this concept to the intellectually unenlightened: Bloatware and the 80/20 myth. [joelonsoftware.com] It's not that bloated, slow software is preferred, exactly, it's simply that so-called "bloat" features are actually an advantage.
I'd personally prefer that FF has automated updates. I noticed the spell-checker after an update, and think it's kinda nice, althoug
Re:Besides the cache (Score:5, Insightful)
Shared Javascript Namespaces (Score:5, Insightful)
Not my experience (Score:4, Informative)
Phoenix user since day 1 (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm very happy with firefox so far. I run half a dozen extensions to give me features like "session saving" etc. Ram usage is not too much of a concern with me. I would like it if the default was to not cache 8 pages back. And on disk cache should be fast enough to retrieve and render. 90% of the time i only go back 1 click anyways.
Firefox 3 is implementing major changes. Under the hood they are switching to garbage collection and cairo (vector rendering) just to name a few. Cairo is a great abstraction that hasn't fully realized its performance capability. I don't suppose glitz will be out anytime soon. The sql-lite bookmarking looks neat. Epiphany has something similar. But i must admit that i've fully switched to del.icio.us and the extension v1.5.29. That's quite fully featured and it syncs across computers.
The rss reading capability i do not like at all. That should be implemented as an extension. I prefer to use liferea. There are plenty of firefox features that should be implemented as extensions. That way you can disable them if you wish.
Oh! Oh! I know! (Score:5, Funny)
Where did I hear that before?
FireFox is a huge resource hog (Score:3, Interesting)
Whenever I clicked from one window to the other, I'd get the Spinning Pizza of Death for a minute or so while the other task's memory was paged in. I had to add another gig of RAM before I could switch windows quickly.
That made this old coder wanna cry. My first Mac had only 512 kilobytes (kilo - not mega) but that was enough for me to write GUI applications with.
Kids these days don't know how to write code.
Re:FireFox is a huge resource hog (Score:5, Informative)
With 512MB, your system was probably already swapping, albeit not very much. OSX uses more RAM than there is any possible justification for, and I don't mean for buffers.
Windows XP is pretty much useless without at the very least 256MB RAM. Oh yeah, you can use it, but you're not going to do anything quickly. You will be constantly swapping. OSX is useless without at least 512MB RAM. You had 256MB too little ram to even play, let alone to have things be efficient.
Many of us would love it if the entire system were rewritten in tight, efficient code. I suggest you get right on that.
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Mac OS X won't run smoothly unless you have at least 1GB of RAM.
Slightly ot... a nit pick about the file cache (Score:5, Interesting)
One think IE does right is a true file-for-file cache of what you have browsed.
Sometimes I like to troll thru my "Temporary Internet Files" folder and pick out a few bits for posterity. Especially large .swf or .flv files that I might have watched. The worst is when I watch one of those in FF, then want to grab the file... the easiest thing to do is to watch it AGAIN in IE so that I can go cache-picking later...
maybe it's just me.
Re:Slightly ot... a nit pick about the file cache (Score:5, Informative)
become? (Score:5, Insightful)
I still use Firefox. Why? Because Firefox works well enough, it's up-to-date, compatible, and, most importantly, has tons of useful extensions.
I hope the Firefox developers will be able to clean up their act, but unless it gets a lot worse, I'm sticking with Firefox, because, on balance, it's still the best browser there is.
Yes, it was. (Score:3, Insightful)
In the early, early days of Firefox, Internet Explorer was pretty slow and bloated. Most of its snappiness came from being "part of the OS". (Or I was a deluded fanboy then, maybe...)
So, on Windows, you had the choice between Netscape (which was big and bloated), or Mozilla if you were smart (which was also big and bloated), or IE (which was bloated, for a browser). Mozilla was not so terribly bloated, except for the fact that it was a browser/mail/news/irc/dev platform/kitchen sink, and not jus
Firefox stopped being lean a long time ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla never was slow (at least not after it reached the point that it was good enough to consider using as your standard browser) and really wasn't a memory hog. That perception came about from the people who really didn't want an integrated email program, but absolutely refused to choose "Browser only" when the installer asked what they wanted.
Around the time of the name changed from Phoenix to Firebird, the two browsers were about on par. By the time the name changed to Firefox, it was already more bloated than Mozilla. The project goals moved more towards grabbing attention than being lean.
If Mozilla had just made a theme that blended in to the OS (Classic doesn't do a good enough job of it) and put a link on the download page to an installer that only had the browser included, there never would have been a need for Firefox.
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I did several benchmarks at the time, and even way back then it was only nominally faster or lighter on RAM. The myth of Firefox being lean and fast is complete marketing.
Firefox, the new EMACS (Score:4, Insightful)
IE is bloated? (Score:4, Insightful)
True, 3rd party add-ons for IE can bring it to a crawl, but that's not IE's fault. The same problem exists in any browser that supports extensibility via a plugin model.
I use Firefox on XP because it's safer than IE, certainly not because it's less bloated. Firefox consistently uses far more ram (I have several screen shots of Firefox using 1.5GB+ of ram with *no* plugins enabled and just one tab open), dies a painful death due to poor integration with things like Flash (100% CPU Flash advertisements, anyone?), or simply just crashes.
On Vista I use IE 7 w/Protected Mode. Why? Well, again, because it's safer. But it also has the benefit of returning me to the days when a browser didn't use 2x the RAM of Photoshop. Imagine that.
The Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how the file size (the other definition of "bloat"), of a FireFox installation compares with other browsers but it doesn't seem like an overly large file to download. It also seems to me that when I check my FireFox preferences it actually has a very basic, simple feature set similar to what's available in almost every other browser. If the feature set is roughly the same as other browsers, how can it be rightly called "bloated?"
I think the problem with FireFox is one of performance, not "bloat" per se. I run FireFox on a Mac with only a single extension and a single theme. My computer is relatively new, the OS is up to date, it has a Gig and a half of RAM and a fast video card. On this machine FireFox is as slow as molasses. It takes ages to start and ages to load a page. It also crashes (a lot!).
I use FireFox because of AdBlocker and because as bad as it is, it's still the best there is on the Mac right now. This will likely change in October when the new Safari comes out so this summer's FireFox 3.0 release will have to be extremely, extremely good just to keep the same market share IMO.
OS Level Control? (Score:3, Insightful)
If firefox becomes bloated (Score:3, Funny)
Get it? 'Fork'? *wink*
I wouldn't worry to much.
Oh and give epiphany a try.
Extensions are a nightmare (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at how extensions are done for Eclipse or JBuilder. It's much cleaner. Don't want an extension anymore? Just delete the JAR or folder. That's it. And it's clean.
Not just Firefox. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time (Score:5, Funny)
Most annoying thing are the crashes of Firefox 2.x! I don't care if it eats a lot of memory (I've got 2GB - who wouldn't these days?) or is bloated, but I can't stand the crashes!
I'm running 3/4 of a gig, and I've never had Firefox crash. And I have BOINC running all the time. My CPU is spinning pretty high all the time, and I tend to have a good bit of my RAM being used all the time. So I don't know what you're doing wrong dude.
Firefox addresses this issue somewhat, setting the default cache lower on computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Startup firefox like so: `firefox -p`. Add a new profile, use that one instead. Profile corruption is usually the cause of firefox crashing. All you have to do is move things over you still want like your bookmarks and go from there. It's a good chance that this'll fix your problem.
A user of mine had this problem yesterd
Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1.) New rendering paradigms in the operating system that require more resources, like resolution independence, vector graphics, and hardware acceleration of window textures in Quartz and Avalon.
2.) In the same vein, screen resolutions and color depths have increased.
3.) Sound cards are ope
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Memory And Performance Rot (Score:4, Insightful)
This performance penalty is perhaps hard to notice. The easiest way to experience it is to run some old applications; they absolutely scream on modern hardware, to the point that the instant response becomes almost worth the loss of extra features. This is probably why things like xfce prosper.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Firefox is written in J#, IE is written in D (Score:5, Funny)
Apple, OTOH, will rewrite Safari, KHTML, Konqueror and most of KDE in Objective Ruby, which will run on their iNternet iServers, accessible via iTCP/iP (compatible with Mac OS 10.9 and up). Right after they switch their kernel to Hurd.
Yes, that's exactly how the future is going to be or my name is not Sir Reginold Frankbarrister O'Fritzebolt-Tooley the Thirteenth!